Shopping

When I went to San Francisco earlier this summer I was eager to try out Recchiuti chocolates. They have a lovely little shop in the Ferry Building where all the most expensive and exclusive fresh foods are sold in the city but it was packed so I just looked and figured I’d buy another day (instead I bought some stuff at Miette Patisserie).

This time I went there at lunchtime on a weekday and found things a lot easier to handle. I had a lovely chat with both the women behind the counter (one was wearing devil horns, I’m thinking because I made my purchase on Halloween).

Recchiuti is the concoction of Michael Recchiuti with the tagline on their website of “Indulgence on the verge of Obsession”. That sounds just like me! He’s been making chocolates since 1997 with special emphasis on flavor combinations and herbal/fruit infusions.

The chocolates are positively lovely. In the store they’re laid out on little plates in beds of crushed cocoa beans. The staff was knowledgeable about all the chocolates and helped to guide me towards the ones I knew I’d like.

They sell in two different ways. You can get a gift box with a set number of chocolate pieces in it or you can buy by the pound ($55 a pound). As it was just for me, I didn’t need the spiffy box and seeing how the candies varied so much in size, I wanted to be free to choose without worrying about whether one flavor was a better value than another. I ended up with a quarter of a pound, which ended up as a large selection (I got quite a few doubles, so only about 2/3 of my booty is shown here - 22 pieces plus one free taste there on the spot with my purchase).

Cardamom Nougat - a rich chocolate ganache infused with cardamom and studded with honeycomb bits (a hard nougat) and cocoa nibs. One of the nibs was just terrible in the two pieces of this flavor that I ate (it was bitter and acrid) but the rest of it was phenomenal and left a fresh feeling in my mouth.

Star Anise & Pink Peppercorn - the anise zings to the front of the flavors here, then the chocolate comes in then that woodsy note of pink peppercorns without any of the burn. The flavors blend nicely and ended up feeling much lighter than I expected.

Rose Caramel - this is the little foil wrapped one there. The caramel was positively liquid and had a pleasant burnt flavor to it with a slight bitter note and a strong rose geranium scent. The rose and bitterness didn’t please me much.

Fleur de Sel Caramel - a great soft and chewy caramel with grains of salt in it. The caramel has a strong bitter and burnt quality to it the salt, of course, is quite strong. I really liked the texture of the soft caramel, but it was just too salty for me.

Honeycomb Malt - the filling is rather like butter with a bit of a grain to it like crystallized honey. The malt flavor is rather mild but the whole thing feels a little greasy and overly sweet.

Bergamot Tea - mellow and zesty with very strong notes of both tea and bergamot. A real favorite of all of them.

Cinnamon Malt - very sweet and with a mild cinnamon flavor. Really too sweet for me, a little grainy and not much in the malt arena to compel me.

Mandarin - the smallest of the truffles. I wasn’t against buying it because I was paying by the pound instead of the piece. Sweet and dry with a nice zesty taste of fresh orange.

Force Noir - a simple dark truffle. They have another line that’s all single origins, but I wanted to try a simple dark truffle. The vanilla notes are very strong, the ganache is light and slightly acidic and super smooth.

Burnt Caramel - oddly, I didn’t get much of a difference between this one and the Force Noir.

Lavender Vanilla - mellow and round chocolate flavors with a strong balsam quality with a very noticeable lavender flavor and a honey finish.

Overall the ganache on most of the truffles is a little greasy for my tastes, it’s more on the butter side than the chocolate side. It keeps them super smooth and provides a good background for the flavor infusions, but the oiliness of them makes me feel fuller faster.

Honestly, I didn’t know it would be so hard to go green. Ten years ago, yeah, I think I would have expected it. But it’s 2006 and there are stores like Whole Foods and even Target and Wal-Mart are carrying organic foods. So why is it so hard?

Halloween represents over $2 BILLION in sales each year (and it grows and grows). The average household spends over $16 on Halloween candy, it seems that there’s room to give them more choices for wholesome and thoughtful candies.

How hard would it be for someone to make fun packs of organic chocolate covered peanuts or raisins? I’ve seen lots of natural gummis and fruit chews, but what about something that’s not bulk that you can give to the kids without them turning up their noses? Organic candy tastes as good (if not better) than regular mass-produced candy. Kids don’t even have to know it’s fair trade or organic ... they just want something tasty, something they probably don’t get every day.

The good thing is that you can make a nice assortment out of the above and still serve 40 or so kids with multiple treats and still stay within that $16 average. Maybe next year there will be more items on that wishlist available.

About a month ago I went off to visit another candy factory. This one is out in Covina, CA and is run by David Klein, inventor of the Jelly Belly jelly bean, so I know he’s got an inventive mind. His current candy life involved a product called Sandy Candy.

Sandy Candy is like sand art, but it’s made from candy powder (ala Pixy Stix). You can buy

kids

kits and then pour the different candy powders into tubes and bottles, creating tasty, colorful layers.

While there on site he showed me some new products he’s working on, which involved using large panning machines (they look like cement mixers). But of course the bulk of his operation is devoted to the Sandy Candy which is HUGELY popular with clubs and groups.

The kit comes with the candy powder in little bottles (like travel-sized shampoo). Just flip the top and tip them over to fill up the little tube. You can make your candy tube according to the flavors (which are marked on the bottoms) or by color (the bottles are milky-translucent, so the actual product is brighter in the tube). The powder itself is far smoother and finer than Pixy Stix which have always been a bit grainy.

Peach (peach)- a nice tangy tingle on the tongue and a good floral/fruity taste.

Tangerine (light orange)- come to mamma! Tart and citrusy with a little more zazz than a normal orange flavor. Goes well with most other flavors, which is a bonus.

Blue Raspberry (medium blue) - really nice. Tangy and floral and not as artificial tasting as it looked. And it’s seriously, deeply blue.

Watermelon (pink) - a sweet flavor, it’s fruity but has a very odd and very distinctive bitter aftertaste.

Banana (light yellow) - a sour banana, not just sweet. Good flavor but a little odd to have the tangy bite to it.

Root Beer (light brown) - I am in LOVE with this flavor. It’s soft on the tongue but has a nice spicy mellow feeling to it. It doesn’t mix well with most of the flavors.

Black Cherry (gray) - nice and tart with less medicine flavor and more of the lighter cherry notes. The color is not really black, but kind of a sparkly charcoal gray.

Pear (medium green) - tangier than I expected with only a slight hint of pear.

Green Apple (light green) - good and tart and with a strong artificial taste that I come to expect from green apple. A winner.

Wild Berry - (purply gray) - smells like cotton candy and tastes like strawberry and raspberry. Fruity and with a little tart zing.

Cotton Candy (light blue) - sweet and slightly tangy but with no other flavor. Not really cotton candy in my book.

Grape (medium purple) - very sweet and with a good fake grape flavor that one expects. Not tangy though.

Lemonade (medium yellow) - super tart but not much flavor. A winner.

Wild Cherry (medium red) - nice and tart with a good blast of cherry flavor. Not at all different from black cherry except for the color.

Then there’s more! Another line includes Candy Pebbles, which are kind of like Wonka Nerds, but a little smaller. They’re about the size of sesame seeds with a good light crunch and zap of flavor. What’s really cool about these isn’t just that they can be used in the Sandy Candy Art, but that you can use them for other things. I think they’d be great as an actual flavored cupcake topper instead of lame plastic tasting jimmies.

Kits can be ordered with the mini bottles for home use or with big ketchup-sized bottles for large events. They look like a great fundraiser for a school fair or just an activity to do with kids where they get to eat what they create. The little 6 inch tubes that came with mine are a good amount of candy, about the size of five single Pixy Stix, so they’re not going to get too amped up.

If you’re someone who always wanted to order Pixy Stix by the pint, your search is over. I ate the whole Lemonade bottle while typing up this review. And part of the Root Beer ... hey, they’re both drinks, aren’t they?

If anyone out there has ever used these, please let me know how it went. It looks super-simple and now that I have this huge kit, I wish I had some kids around to play with it.

There are two ways to order. For retail orders go to SandyCandy.com. For wholesale orders go to NiftyCandy.com. The extra large kit shown here is $50 and has 50 candy straws and includes 20 bottles of different flavors. Smaller kits are also available.

I give the whole kit a 7 out of 10. I really love the concept and think that it’s great fun for kids, especially if you spring for the fun shaped bottles. The variety of flavors is great, especially the fact that there’s Root Beer in there! The only drawback is the difficulty of ordering and the packaging isn’t really that all that exciting. (If I could just order single bottles of my favorite flavors, well, I’d be in trouble.)

Finally! Someone’s making it easy to give wholesome, slaveless candy for Halloween!

I just popped over to Artisan Sweets (who seems to be the ONLY place on the internet to find Montelimar Nougat) and they’ve got a Natural Trick or Treat candy bag!

72 pieces of yummy all natural candy you can feel good about handing out. Approximately 24 pieces each of Endangered Species ethically traded milk chocolate bites, Yummy Earth organic fruit lollipops, and pure honey mint patties. All packed in a Halloween-y treat bag.

All for $20.00, so if you don’t have a store near you to get what you’re looking for, finally someone has combined the hard candies and the chocolates into one batch. Yeah, it’s a little expensive, but you know, not using slaves just drives up the price of things! They’re running a special - 10% off of Halloween treats, but please, for the love of all that’s holy, don’t give children Sunspire Drops.

There are plenty of sites that can offer you info on all the gross and spooky treats for Halloween. I thought I’d offer up a series of posts that might help you make some more environmentally and socially aware decisions for Halloween.

It’s a good opportunity to give kids a special treat that isn’t necessarily full of artificial chemicals or results from a lot fertilizers and pesticides being applied to the earth. And just perhaps child slaves weren’t used in the creation of it. But who wants to be that house on the street that gives out toothbrushes or quarters or apples? There must be products out there that can satisfy everyone.

I’ll be posting for the next few weeks on the topic of different good tasting treats you can hand out to the kids, some that might even be affordable and available in your local area.

If you want a top-to-bottom approach for the whole Green lifestyle, Siel at GreenLAGirl is going to be helping me out by posting about the big picture. She started today with the first in her series. She’ll cover the politics of chocolate, organic and fair trade issues and of course positive changes we can all incorporate into our lives.

Here are a few of the organic and fair trade sweets I’ve reviewed to date. Not all are appropriate for handing out to Trick-or-Treaters, so I’ll make an effort to bring you more about those, but learning more about the brands that are available might help you make a decision at the store:

There are some great candy webstores out there. And there are also that are not so great. I’ve been contacted twice in the past month regarding HometownCandy.com, which is run by the same company that runs JordanAlmonds.com and ebulkcandy.com. (I’m not doing any linking here where not necessary.)

The complaints I’ve heard are from people who place an order and never get their candy. Their credit card is charged but then nothing is shipped and of course their emails and phone calls go unanswered.

First, JordanAlmonds and ebulkcandy are not completely secured. Sure, when you put stuff in a cart and check out at either site, it is a secure page (that’s when you see the https:// in the address). But there are also prompts on JordanAlmonds to input your credit card on unsecured pages and on ebulkcandy. Bad form. You’re opening yourself up to someone else sniffing out your credit card number and other personal info.

Now, I haven’t ordered from either of these companies so I cannot testify one way or another personally. But here are the Better Business Bureau listings for them:

HometownCandy.com - 1 complaint which is unresolved. HometownCandy is not a member of the BBB.

EBulkCandy.com - 52 complaints, 4 resolved in Morrisville, PA. It’s not clear if this site is still in operation. It’s up, but doesn’t appear to have been updated this year. The have had several different locations, and each one has its own file with the BBB. Ewing, NJ (28 complaints, 2 resolved), Hamilton, NJ (1 complaint, unresolved), West Trenton, NJ (18 complaints, 3 resolved)

Alexa and a domain name search reveals that ebulkcandy’s domain is held in the Czech Republic by the same contact info as HometownCandy but doesn’t show a direct relationship to JordanAlmonds (except for an address in NJ in common).

Now, for the record, just having complaints filed at the BBB does not make the company bad. Lots of large companies have complaints lodged against them (sometimes people go there first, without contacting the company directly). The key is whether or not the company is a member of the BBB and further, if they respond to and resolve the complaints. Volume has a lot to do with it as well. Even when you have 99.9% satisfaction, if you have 100,000 transactions a year you might have 100 unhappy people ... and if 10% of those don’t get a resolution through you, they’re gonna go complain elsewhere. It’s not just complaints that are important, but resolutions.

If you’re looking to buy something online and you feel a little odd, check around. It’s your money and your candy. Running a candy store is not rocket science. You put up a list of what you have, people order it and you send it out to them. There are lots of ways to screw it up (send the wrong thing, charge the card wrong, send it to the wrong place, pack things improperly), but lots of ways to fix it if you do make a mess. The fact that there are so many choices out there means that you can make informed choices.

The first thing to check for is a real address (usually found on their “returns” section), a real phone number and names of the people who run the company. Membership in the BBB, a Yahoo! Trusted Sites seal, a well organized site that uses the latest in web design and technology. Google the company and see if they have complaints against them. If you’re worried about it, move along, there are plenty of places to get candy.

So, if you’ve ever ordered from one of these companies, what was your experience. Good or bad?

UPDATE 2/22/2007: I got this email earlier today:

I have been asked by our Compliance Department to send you the following response regarding the complaints made against Hometowncandy.com:

Please be advised that as of February 1, 2007, Net Atlantic, Inc. terminated all Internet services to Ebulkcandy.com (a/k/a Jordonalmonds.com
and Hometowncandy.com) because of their failure to properly address unresolved issues brought to our attention.

Net Atlantic, Inc.
Compliance Department

This does not mean that the websites are gone, the obviously found other internet service, but it’s an interesting approach, getting the service provider involved.
UPDATE 4/9/2007: To everyone who has commented, I recommend contacting the New Jersey Attorney General and their consumer affairs department:

Since I’ve never ordered from them, I’m unable to file a complain on behalf of a third party.

Also, there is a website called Consumerist.com that helps people get the word out about bad companies. I’ve contacted them, but I’m not able to offer a first-hand experience. Check them out and see if they can give this issue wider exposure. Try this site as well: www.ripoffreport.com.

UPDATE 7/2/2007: Some commenters have noted that the NJ Consumer Affairs office refuses to investigate, saying that it is a federal matter. If you’d like to file a formal complaint, direct it to the Federal Trade Comission, which investigates mail fraud (and now covers internet transactions).

Little did I know my summer vacation would take me right there ... twice.

Powell’s Sweet Shoppe is more than just a simple candy shop. They have a fantastic selection of retro candy bars, bulk candies like ColorWorks M&Ms, Jelly Belly and other wrapped candies like Smarties, salt water taffy and Mary Janes. They also have a large selection of Twinkle lollipops and novelty items including tins of gum and mints all displayed in old buffets and apothecary cupboards. Don’t worry, they didn’t leave out chocolate aficianados, there was a decent selection of high end chocolate bars from Scharffen Berger, Hachez, Michel Cluizel and others.

Then there’s the gelato ... and soda pop. They have a huge selection of sodas in glass bottles from the plain old Crush to the microbrewed Root Beers.

But they also had a good selection of UK import bars, classic candy boxes and huge display of Fizzies (which have returned after being off the market for decades).

The prices were decent. I picked up a few classic regional bars for 89 cents each.

The biggest find there was a trove of Reeds candies in Root Beer and Cinnamon flavor. I know that there are quite a few people who have been looking high and low for them, well there are at least a dozen full boxes there in Windsor.

Windsor itself is an odd town. At first glance it looks like Healdsburg or any number of Victorian-era settlements off of Highway 101. But a closer inspection reveals that it’s all new construction. The center of town with its charming facades and pastels/terra cotta colors is pretty much turn of this century. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to live in a town that has a vibrant downtown and centralized gathering place. It just took me by surprise. For more on that see this article from SFGate.

Powell’s is completely themed with candy but a bit of a jumble. There is a soundtrack for the store and it consists of the song “Pure Imagination” sung by Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Over and over again. Add to that a little viewing area in the back with a loop of the movies. I was in the store for four loops of the song ... I don’t know how you could work there without going batty. That said, when I asked the sales staff about the Reeds candies, all they knew was that they were discontinued, they wouldn’t sell a whole box at any discount and they flat out refused to consider shipping them at all.

I also stopped at their sister store in Healdsburg (purely by coincidence) which is slightly smaller but had the same inventory.

If you’re toodling around wine country, it’s a great stop for something a little different. There were plenty of families with kids there, but also a good share of grownups shopping by themselves.

I found a new candy store and they have everything! (I can’t remember who suggested this, but I thank you most wholeheartedly!) Mel & Rose, which is on Melrose Blvd near La Cienega (just north of the Beverly Center).

Well, maybe they don’t have everything, but a lot of the things I’ve been looking for and a good assortment of things I didn’t even know existed. They didn’t have KitKat bars from around the world, but they had Kinder Eggs.

Mel & Rose is a liquor store, wine store (in a separate space) and deli with a large selection of fine chocolate bars. They also have a huge selection of imported consumer candies, such UK imports like Flake, Cadbury, Aeros and Bassett’s. There are German candies like Ritter and a whole line of Haribo bagged treats. Australian brands like Cherry Mash, Life Savers and Aussie licorice.

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